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BRAINMATTER - Intelligence Beyond Limits

timeline

Evolution of Intelligence Timeline

From the first nervous systems to digital minds - 600 million years of intelligence.

A long-arc view of how intelligence emerged, diversified, and accelerated - from biological nervous systems through symbolic culture to artificial cognition.

~600 MyaFirst nervous systems

Cnidarians evolve nerve nets - the earliest known biological information-processing networks.

~525 MyaCentralized brains

Cambrian vertebrates develop bilateral nervous systems with cephalized brains.

~200 MyaMammalian cortex

Layered neocortex emerges, supporting flexible learning and prediction.

~7 MyaHominin lineage

Brain volume and tool use begin a sustained co-evolutionary expansion.

~300 KyaHomo sapiens

Modern human cognition: language, symbolic culture, cumulative learning.

~3000 BCEWriting systems

External symbolic storage extends individual memory across generations.

1837Babbage's Analytical Engine

First conceptual general-purpose computer; Ada Lovelace writes the first algorithm.

1943McCulloch–Pitts neuron

First mathematical model of a neural network as a logical computing element.

1956Dartmouth Workshop

The term 'artificial intelligence' is coined; the AI research field is founded.

1986Backpropagation popularized

Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams enable practical training of multilayer networks.

2012AlexNet / Deep learning era

Krizhevsky et al. win ImageNet, triggering the modern deep-learning revolution.

2017Transformer architecture

Vaswani et al. introduce attention-only sequence models - the foundation of LLMs.

2022ChatGPT public release

Conversational AI reaches 100M users in two months - fastest consumer adoption in history.

2024–2026Reasoning models & agents

Inference-time reasoning (o-series, Claude) and autonomous agents push toward general capability.

Evolution of Intelligence Timeline - BRAINMATTER

Key takeaways

  • Intelligence is not a single thing - it has appeared in many substrates over evolutionary time.
  • Each major leap (cortex, language, writing, computing) externalized or accelerated cognition.
  • The pace of artificial-intelligence progress has compressed millions of years of evolutionary change into decades.

More visual knowledge

AGI Development Timeline

Key milestones, theories, and capability jumps on the path toward artificial general intelligence.

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AI Research Organization Map

The frontier ecosystem of AI labs grouped by mission, model family, and lineage.

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Neurotechnology Landscape

Devices and methods that read or modulate the nervous system, grouped by invasiveness.

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Human Brain Functional Map

Major brain regions and the cognitive functions they support, organized by lobe and system.

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